I have uploaded a new book which is freely downloadable here: The Shape of Reality.
The preface begins:
Is a man a unity or is he a collection of warring fragments? Or is the proper question perhaps my favorite: Is man some sort of complex being not describable in current terms of discourse? I should qualify my statement of the last possibility, which I believe to the closest to the truth: I think mathematicians working in the most abstract regions currently accessible to the human mind have discovered tools of thought, quantitative and qualitative, which can provide us with superior ways of discussing complex forms of created being. That entire argument is one which can be carried out only by way of a program to show such is the case. This book will be the first step in such a program—unless this step sends me into a brier-patch or over a cliff.
Fittingly personal as a preface should be.
The introduction to the book begins a bit more soberly, crossing the border into metaphysical regions, so uncomfortable to modern human beings who think philosophy deals with beer and baseball and maybe proving that 19 year-old illiterate freshmen have as much right to determine the meaning of a text as does the author or the scholar who has worked hard at studying that text and its greater context.
Human being isn’t merely quantifiable but many components or aspects of human being are quantifiable. Other components or aspects are more describable by the term `qualitative’, but this shouldn’t be taken as connoting `irrational’ or `mystical’. Our understanding of the qualitative aspects of being, human and other, should be as orderly as our understanding of the quantitative aspects of being. Yet, I’ll warn that I threaten by the end of this book to pull off one of those sleights of hand for which philosophers are famous—I’ll suggest the terms `qualitative’ and `quantitative’ should be retired in favor of `abstract’ and `concrete’. Since these latter terms are understood in ways I think to be implausible in light of modern mathematics and physics, I’ll use the less plausible terms, `qualitative’ and `quantitative’ for much of the book while gently banging on the drum of `abstract being’.
So, how are we to see our human beings as unified, even if only in principle? Have the quantitative and the qualitative come to be “the new dualism”? Some Medieval Scholastics rejected the concept of `soul’ or `mind’ because it’s not clear if it be at all possible to unite two different sorts of substances to make a single human being.
There seems to be a small problem with page links in this file. The referencing link shows the right page but the page references seem to mostly go to the title page of the section containing the page.
I’ve chosen to release the file as is for now. I’ll release a corrected version when possible.